Me against Jeffrey Gundlach

I gotta confess, I'm long the yen. I know I'm crazy, but I'm long the yen.

You may have seen this: Jeffrey Gundlach is killing it being short yen.

So why am I going against this guy who's one of the world's best known money managers and who's currently, "killing it" being short the yen?

Here's why...

I'll start by saying that besides Gundlach, there are several other "well known" people who are short yen or who have been advising people to short the yen. They are people like Peter Schiff, Axel Merk and Kyle Bass. I'm sorry, but when those three stooges get together on a theme, wild horses can't keep me from betting against them. All I need now is for John Paulson to say he's going short the yen and I will mortgage everything I have to add to this position. By the way, they're all short because of...you guessed it...fears of BoJ "money printing" and insolvency.

And the three stooges have a lot of company. Open interest and short positions by speculators (including small specs, who are considered the dumb money) is just off record levels. Commericals are long.

Since the election the yen has sold off something like 500 basis points against the dollar, or about 6%. That's all been due to aggressive yen shorting.

The new government believes it is "out of money," so an outright fiscal expansion underpinned by printing yen, is out of the question.

Prime minister Abe has been pressuring the BoJ and the BoJ has responded by saying it will "buy more assets." Great...more QE, that is just an asset swap and does nothing to weaken the yen.

The new government is also very close to the corporate sector and it is believed that it will soon give the ok to restart the nuclear reactors, which have been shut down since the quake. If so, this will go far to reverse Japan's current trade deficit, which came about solely as a result of massive oil imports to meet energy needs.

The markets believe this to be true and imminent, as shares in Japanese power companies have been surging.

So...Japan and the BoJ are doing nothing to create net new yen financial assets. The nukes will be restarted soon and the dumb money is shorting the yen like crazy.

If that's not a prescription for a yen rally, a big, big, BIG, one, I don't know what is.

Bearish yen talk from the same guys that got everything else wrong

There's a lot of bearish yen talk going around and I can understand the traders' mind of wanting to short a currency that has been so strong for so long (think Jim Rogers or Kyle Bass or Peter Schiff shorting Treasuries for years and years and years) and I also understand that this time it could be different as Japan has shown an inclination recently to sell yen for euros in an effort to support exports to the Eurozone. However, what makes me suspicious about this short yen trade is that it's coming from all the same people and they are making all the same, stupid and failied arguments that they made for Treasuries (and JGBs) and QE and hyperinflation, etc.

Here's an example of what I am talking about. Axel Merk, who runs a currency fund, who's been predicting a dollar collapse for years (like Schiff) because of Fed "money printing" is bearish on the yen now (presumably because none of his other trades worked out) and he wrote this:

The size of the current account deficit represents the amount foreigners need to buy in assets (local financial assets or real assets) to keep a currency from falling. With a current account deficit, Japan's debt to GDP ratio of over 200% may suddenly matter, as Japan may need to offer higher rates to attract foreigners to buy local assets (e.g., Japanese government bonds). The trouble is that Japan’s debt might be unsustainable at higher interest rates. To the extent that Japan has a current account surplus, it doesn't matter whether foreigners buy the yen, but those surpluses have fallen to deficits recently and that trend looks set to continue.

Once again Merk is showing his lack of understanding of macro. Lets have a look. Take thus sentence, for example:

"The size of the current account deficit represents the amount foreigners need to buy in assets (local financial assets or real assets) to keep a currency from falling."

Those assets that Merk says foreigners need to buy, well, they've already bought. A nation's current account balance is equal but opposite to its capital account. So if a country has a current account deficit it has a capital account surplus of the same magnitude. In practical terms it means that it paid for those imports in yen, and those yen sit at the Bank of Japan, parked in Japanese gov't instruments. They're the very financial assets Merk worries that foreigners will have to buy, but they've already been bought. It's all just accounting.

Merk has this notion that Japan needs to go looking around for investors to "finance" this trade deficit, but that's already done in the capital (or, cash) side of the transaction.

Furthermore, the current account balance has no impact on interest rates whatsoever (as Merk suggests) as we clearly have seen with th U.S. which runs HUGE current account deficits and interest rates are at historic lows. And even if the BOJ were to raise its interest rates it doesn't make Japan's debt "unsustainable." They can pay any rate because they print yen, just like the US can pay any rate because it prints dollars. The debt never becomes unsustainable.

And on and on it goes. Another example of clueless idiots who just keep repeating the same, old, tired, misinformed crap even as they are proven wrong over and over and over and over and over.

For what it's worth, I am long yen.